Tag Archives: time-warner

With the acquisition of Time Warner’s movie and TV production companies, AT&T theoretically has the assets to become a vertically integrated content creation, packaging and delivery behemoth. But not all of its assets – including its management team – are necessarily well suited to the task.

AT&T’s challenge is to avoid outrunning its ability to manage three very different types of businesses: entertainment production, subscription-based linear video distribution and a huge heterogeneous telecoms network. Two of those businesses – subscription video and telecoms – are changing rapidly, and AT&T needs both vision and capital to stay in the game.

So far, it appears to be short on both. There’s a limit to what you can do with a satellite video network. DirecTv will never be interactive, so it can’t leverage its distribution investment to create on demand services that mimic over the top (OTT) providers in the same way cable companies can.

AT&T’s telecom business is also showing the strain. It’s holding back on 5G and fiber upgrades, and increasingly relying on its existing 4G infrastructure and technology. AT&T is replacing copper networks in rural and other less lucrative communities with 4G-based fixed wireless service , in part by relying on federal public safety and universal service fund subsidies. It’s also investing in marginal 4G upgrades and labelling it 5G. Well, 5Ge. But, as AT&T intends, it’s easy to miss the little e.

Outside of the limited areas where it’s investing in fiber upgrades, AT&T’s networks are taking a back seat to more specialised players in its footprint. Cable companies can deliver faster broadband service more widely and have a plausible chance of creating OTT-like video services that are only available inside a provider’s own network, via fast lanes that are isolated from the public Internet. OTT companies are sucking up consumer viewing hours and pure play, or near pure play, mobile companies could move more quickly towards true 5G service (although Verizon has put its early and much hyped pre–5G deployments on hold).

It will take an exceptionally talented and diverse executive team to pull these ill-fitting assets together into a unified programming and telecoms juggernaut. AT&T’s “fix” for HBO, for example – simply telling everyone to start producing more great stuff – and its disingenuous, if not downright deceitful, mislabelling of 4G service indicates that it doesn’t yet have the management and vision it needs to prevail over the long run.

The “assumption” the court criticized was the fundamental economic principle, recognized in case law, that the merged firm would maximize its corporate-wide profits (rather than instruct Turner and DirecTV to operate independently at the expense of overall profits to the parent corporation). This basic economic axiom of corporate-wide profit maximization forms the basis for much of corporate and antitrust law.

The brief opened with a stark warning about the danger of allowing AT&T to use its monopoly/duopoly control over broadband access to maximise its return on its Time Warner investment…

The government’s lawsuit challenging AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner concerns the future of the telecommunications and media industries in the United States. Its outcome could determine whether the participants in these industries will be permitted to merge into vertically integrated firms that control valuable programming content as well as the means of distributing that content directly to end-customers in a manner that hurts competition and therefore consumers. If AT&T is permitted to control Time Warner’s most valuable media assets, the merged firm will have both the incentive and the ability to raise its rivals’ costs and stifle growth of innovative, next-generation entrants that offer attractive alternatives to AT&T/DirecTV’s legacy pay-TV model—all to the detriment of American consumers.

The Washington, D.C. appeals court agreed to the justice department request to put the case on a fast track. It set out a schedule for written arguments, with the final briefs due in mid-October. That’s just for the first round, though. If the appeals court decides to take up the case, a decision will likely be many months away.

The justice department didn’t outline a specific goal, but one possibility is that it wants AT&T to give up some of its new empire, perhaps Turner channels such as CNN. According to a story in Variety by Ted Johnson, it could turn out to be a risky maneuver…

Larry Downes, senior industry and innovation fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy, said that the Justice Department’s appeal carries risks for the government. Leon’s decision does not hold precedent, he noted, while the D.C. Circuit decision likely would.

“The court could use the opportunity to comment generally on the legal standards for opposing vertical mergers, for example, or reaffirm in broad terms the general principles of consumer harm that have guided antitrust law for the last forty years — rejecting, in effect, recent calls for expanding antitrust to take into account the economics of online platforms that don’t charge consumers and therefore don’t raise prices when they acquire other companies,” he said via email…

“The DOJ is really gambling — and could wind up losing not just this case but its ability to challenge future deals in a wide range of industries currently undergoing disruption,” he said.

Vertical mergers – where a company acquires its supply chain – aren’t always anticompetitive. But it always will be when dominant, monopoly model Internet service providers like AT&T and Comcast can manipulate broadband traffic to favor in-house content, as the end of network neutrality allows them to do.

A federal judge decided yesterday that AT&T may buy Time Warner’s video and motion picture content companies, including HBO, CNN and the Warner Brothers movie studio. Judge Richard Leon, who was appointed by president George W. Bush, put no conditions on the acquisition. He simply ruled “the government’s request to enjoin the proposed merger is denied”.

The 172 page decision does an excellent of outlining the current state of the video distribution market. AT&T wants to buy Time Warner so its DirecTv and other video services – delivered via satellite and mobile and wireline networks – can better compete with the likes of Netflix, Comcast (which also owns an extensive stable of content companies) and Amazon. Leon’s decision picks apart, and ultimately rejects, the federal justice department’s claim that the deal would “substantially lessen competition in the video programming and distribution market”.

AT&T witnesses testified that they believe the company’s future lies in the use of online and mobile wireless connections to access premium video. As John Stankey, the AT&T executive who will be tasked with running Time Warner should the merger proceed, explained, AT&T acquired DirecTV in 2015 not in an effort to double down on the satellite business—a concededly mature and indeed declining asset—but to “pick up a lot of new customers that we could work on migrating” to new, innovative products necessary to compete in the future.

It’s possible that the federal justice department will challenge Leon’s decision, and could ask an appeals court to put the deal on hold while it’s under review. That’s all speculative, though. As of now, AT&T and Time Warner can close the sale next week as planned.

It’s up to a federal judge to decide whether or not AT&T can buy Time Warner, and all the content and video channels that come along with it. The federal justice department tried to make the case that the deal would be anti-competitive and should be blocked. AT&T, naturally enough, claimed it wasn’t.

Some experts who followed the trial closely thought AT&T made the better case. The justice department has to prove that a vertical merger – when a company buys its supplier – would have the same destructive effect on competition as a horizontal one, when a company buys a competitor. That’s a tough sell, and it seems that justice department lawyers aren’t counting on total victory. In its closing brief, the justice department offered Plan B: a “targeted divestiture” – either allow AT&T to buy some of Time Warner’s content assets (HBO and Warner Brothers, but not Turner channels) or force it to give up ownership of DirecTv.

Usefully, the justice department argued strongly for a “structural”, rather than a “behavioral” remedy. The difference is that a structural solution involves a permanent change – divesting DirecTv or not acquiring Turner, for example – while a behavioral change only involves a promise not to do bad things in the future…

While structural relief eliminates the risk of harm, behavioral relief assumes regulatory conditions can effectively constrain a business’s natural incentives to maximize profits…Behavioral relief is also less effective at protecting competition than structural market-oriented remedies because it “can hardly be detailed enough to cover in advance all the many fashions in which improper influence [over the acquired company] might manifest itself.”

Just so. Behavioral remedies require ongoing oversight by regulators with little experience or interest in the business at hand, and lead to perpetual evasion by corporate execs and lawyers with all the incentive and resources in the world.

Last week’s other big broadband story offers hope of an even more effective counterweight to broadband monopolies: anti-trust law. When the federal justice department sued to block AT&T’s takeover of Time Warner, it made a clean break from recent practice and went after the root cause of the problem – pursued a structural remedy – instead of nibbling around the edges with temporary and often tangential behavioral restrictions on the companies. It’s a strategy – and philosophy – outlined in a recent speech to the American Bar Association by Makan Delrahim, the new assistant attorney general in charge of anti-trust enforcement…

Like any regulatory scheme, behavioral remedies require centralized decisions instead of a free market process. They also set static rules devoid of the dynamic realities of the market. With limited information, how can antitrust lawyers hope to write rules that distort competitive incentives just enough to undo the damage done by a merger, for years to come? I don’t think I’m smart enough to do that.

Behavioral remedies often require companies to make daily decisions contrary to their profit-maximizing incentives, and they demand ongoing monitoring and enforcement to do that effectively. It is the wolf of regulation dressed in the sheep’s clothing of a behavioral decree. And like most regulation, it can be overly intrusive and unduly burdensome for both businesses and government.

The justice department’s complaint called out the problem. When Comcast bought NBC-Universal – a similar deal – the justice department and the Federal Communications Commission extracted promises of good behavior. Some targeted direct, anti-competitive problems, while others went after unrelated side benefits, like discounted broadband rates for low income households. But it won’t matter much longer whether those promises did any good: they all expire next year. Comcast will be free to be, well, Comcast.

The broadband market in the U.S. is mostly a mix of outright monopolies and cozy duopolies, which are themselves collapsing into monopolies as cable companies outstrip telcos’ ability to deliver broadband at the federal advanced services standard of 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload speeds. The Federal Communications Commission is determined to let that happen. With its new found zeal for trust busting, the justice department is the unexpected last line of defence.

If allowed to proceed, this merger will harm consumers by substantially lessening competition among traditional video distributors and slowing emerging online competition. After the merger, the merged company would have the power to make its video distributor rivals less competitive by raising their costs, resulting in even higher monthly bills for American families. The merger also would enable the merged firm to hinder the growth of online distributors that it views as a threat to the traditional pay-TV model…

AT&T/DirecTV perceives online video distribution as an attack on its business that could, in its own words, “deteriorate the value of the bundle.” Accordingly, AT&T/DirecTV intends to “work to make [online video services] less attractive.” AT&T/DirecTV executives have concluded that the “runway” for the decline of traditional pay-TV “may be longer than some think given the economics of the space,” and that it is “upon us to utilize our assets to extend that runway.” This merger would give the merged firm key, valuable assets, empowering it to do just that.

The core problem, according to yesterday’s filing is the proposed combination of DirecTv, which, when combined with AT&T’s Uverse service, is the nation’s largest television distributor, and Time Warner’s Turner networks. That lends credence to reports over the past couple of weeks that federal anti-trust lawyers wanted AT&T to give up one or the other in order to avoid going to court.

Charter purchased TWC in May 2016. It took over operation of systems and customer equipment that couldn’t delivered speeds that were advertised or that customers purchased and “even now, [Charter] continues to offer Internet speeds that we found they cannot reliably deliver”, Schneiderman alleges. TWC went so far as to rig speed tests run by the Federal Communications Commission, according to the lawsuit…

[Time Warner Cable] leased older-generation modems to over 900,000 subscribers in New York State…However, [Time Warner Cable] knew that, in practice, these older-generation modems were incapable of achieving the Internet speeds its subscribers were led to believe they were paying for…

[Time Warner Cable] managed its cable network in a way that did not deliver the promised Internet speeds over any type of connection. It cut corners by packing too many subscribers in the same service group, which resulted in slower speeds for subscribers, especially during peak hours. It also failed to add more channels for each service group, which similarly resulted in slower speeds for subscribers…[Time Warner Cable] further deceived the FCC by manipulating the average Internet speed results in the FCC’s speed tests. The company inflated the average speed results by providing increased Internet speeds when service groups were less utilized to offset (and conceal) test results showing slower speeds when the service groups had heavier usage. By gaming the FCC speed tests in this manner, [Time Warner Cable] concealed the fact that it failed to consistently deliver the promised speeds to its subscribers under actual network conditions.

“I have been on the record in the past of saying it’s too big and we have to keep competition. So, but other than that, I haven’t, you know, I haven’t seen any of the facts, yet. I’m sure that will be presented to me and to the people within government.”

Wall Street’s optimism about a kinder attitude toward big mergers in Washington, DC appears to be a safer bet.

There are two reasons why trustbusters should now take a tougher line. First, the telecoms industry is already a rent-seekers’ paradise. Americans pay at least 50% more for mobile and broadband service than people in other rich countries. For each dollar invested in infrastructure and spectrum, American operators make 28 cents of operating profit a year, compared with 18 cents for European firms. That reflects the lack of competition. AT&T and Verizon control 70% of the mobile market, and are the only firms that reach 90% or more of Americans with high-speed services. Half of the population has no choice of fixed-broadband supplier. The lack of downstream competition in pipes could distort competition in upstream content…

A second concern is that AT&T-Time Warner would have vast political and lobbying power, allowing it to bend rules over time, including any antitrust remedies that it agreed with regulators. It would capture 28% of the media-and-telecoms industry’s pre-tax profits and 2% of all corporate profits, making it America’s third-biggest domestic firm. Media and telecoms regulation is already intensely political, and AT&T today is no shrinking violet, being a vocal opponent of net neutrality, the rules that ensure that all online traffic is treated equally.

I’d argue that CenturyLink’s purchase of Level 3’s fiber network – particularly the extensive overlapping routes the two companies share – is a more direct and immediate threat to what little remains of telecoms competition in the U.S. But from the big picture point of view, The Economist has it right.